In an unprecedented turn of events, an Italian court has put the heart of earthquake science on trial by accusing seven Italian earthquake experts for failing to warn residents about a 2009 earthquake that killed 309 people

During the next major disaster, New Jersey emergency responders will receive assistance from the big box retailer Target; last week the company announced that it had officially teamed up with New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness to assist state and local officials in the event of a major disaster or terrorist attack

Animals begin to behave strangely in the days leading to an earthquake. Researchers find that the chemistry of ground water changes in the run up to an earthquake, and that animals sense these chemical changes and begin to move away. Scientists suggest animal behavior could be incorporated into earthquake forecasting.

This year the federal government’s annual nationwide disaster drill was hampered by actual disasters; due to an unusually severe series of natural disasters across the country, several states, local agencies, and federal employees were unable to participate in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Level Exercise as they were too responding to real emergencies

On Sunday residents of Oklahoma were shook by their sixth earthquake in four days; these quakes come in the wake of Oklahoma’s strongest earthquake on record, which struck the state on 5 November; the 5.6 magnitude tremor damaged dozens of homes and caused a freeway to buckle

More than 200 million people are affected by disasters each year and in 2010 at least 300,000 people died in major disaster events; annual reported disaster losses now regularly exceed $100 billion; Mind-Alliance, a developer of Information Sharing Management software for homeland security, emergency preparedness, and business continuity professionals, has joined the UN Disaster Risk Reduction Private Sector Partnership

This year’s rash of deadly natural disasters has displaced tens of thousands of people and shattered families across the United States; with the Thanksgiving holiday approaching, many will find it impossible to celebrate in their own home or be forced to face an empty seat once occupied by a loved one

A leading infrastructure expert believes an assessment needs to be made of the level of “very rare” earthquake that needs to be considered in structural design, perhaps one with a 10,000 year return period or higher, rather than the 500 year return period that is commonly adopted for many buildings in Australia

To protect Houston and Galveston from future hurricanes, experts recommends building a floodgate across the Houston Ship Channel, adding new levees to protect densely populated areas on Galveston Island and the developed west side of Galveston Bay; the team also recommends creating a 130-mile-long coastal recreation area to sustainably use wetlands that act as a natural flood barrier

This year’s unprecedented number of major natural disasters including Hurricane Irene, the record number of tornadoes, and the floods along the entire Mississippi and Missouri rivers strained the Federal Emergency Management’s (FEMA) coffers, but the number of relatively minor disasters that were declared as “major disasters” pushed FEMA resources beyond their limit; some critics say this trend needs to stop

October saw devastating — and costly — natural disasters in different parts of the world; in Thailand, the flooding has impacted 64 of Thailand’s 77 provinces, affecting more than 9.9 million people with at least 427 reported dead. Preliminary economic losses have been listed at $9.8 billion, with insured losses already estimated at more than $4.6 billion

Troubles continue at the beleaguered Fukushima Daichii nuclear power plant in Japan with officials detecting radioactive xenon gas, a byproduct of nuclear fission, from reactor two nearly eight months after the dangerous meltdowns

Following the devastating tornado that leveled Joplin, Missouri in May, thousands of residents were forced to take up temporary housing in FEMA mobile home parks, but of late many have become increasingly uneasy about their living situation following the discovery of a methamphetamine lab in a FEMA temporary housing complex

Pollution is making Arabian Sea cyclones more intense, according to a just-published study; traditionally, prevailing wind shear patterns prohibit cyclones in the Arabian Sea from becoming major storms; the new study suggests that weakening winds have enabled the formation of stronger cyclones in recent years

The long view

The company called One Concern has all the characteristics of a buzzy and promising Silicon Valley start-up: young founders from Stanford, tens of millions of dollars in venture capital and a board with prominent names. Its particular niche is disaster response. And it markets a way to use artificial intelligence to address one of the most vexing issues facing emergency responders in disasters: figuring out where people need help in time to save them. That promise to bring new smarts and resources to an anachronistic field has generated excitement. But there are skeptics, and interviews and documents show the company has often exaggerated its tools’ abilities and has kept outside experts from reviewing its methodology.

The series of powerful earthquakes that shook Southern California in July prompted understandable concern about whether the region is prepared for a period of possibly more active seismic shifts. It also generated, however, a viral wave of apocalyptic warnings that a “supervolcano” in Yellowstone National Park, a few states away, was about to erupt and plunge the world into darkness in a colossal explosion of lava and ash. There is a serious volcanic threat in the contiguous U.S., but it isn’t in Wyoming,” Sillow writes. “It lurks hundreds of miles to the west, inside the snow-capped, picture-postcard peaks of Mount Rainier, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood and others. They might look like ordinary mountains, but in fact they are volcanoes—and potentially dangerous ones.

The town of Whaley Bridge in the UK has had to be evacuated after damage to a dam built in 1831. The Toddbrook Reservoir is just one of many ageing dams worldwide not designed for ever more extreme rainfall as the planet warms. Dams are typically designed to cope with a so-called 1-in-100-year flood event. But as the world warms the odds of extreme rainfall are changing, meaning the risk of failure is far greater. Engineers have been warning for years that many old dams around the world are already unsafe and need upgrading or dismantling.

We are not ready for the extreme rainfall coming with climate change. A quick dramatic thunderstorm in New York on Wednesday flooded Staten Island so badly that brown murky water joined bus riders for their evening ride home. It’s just one in a growing number of examples of infrastructure not being up to the task. Many cities’ water management systems—think stormwater drains or dams—aren’t equipped to handle climate change-influenced weather shifts.

Much of the planet sweltered in unprecedented heat in July, as temperatures soared to new heights in the hottest month ever recorded. The record warmth also shrank Arctic and Antarctic sea ice to historic lows. The average global temperature in July was 1.71 degrees F above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, making it the hottest July in the 140-year record, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. The previous hottest month on record was July 2016. Nine of the 10 hottest Julys have occurred since 2005—with the last five years ranking as the five hottest. Last month was also the 43rd consecutive July and 415th consecutive month with above-average global temperatures.

It’s only a matter of time until major powers try to stop climate change by any means necessary. The Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is accelerating development of the Amazon rainforest (60 percent of which is in Brazilian hands), thereby imperiling a critical global resource. As readers with more respect for science than Bolsonaro know, the rainforest is both an important carbon sink and a critical temperature regulator, as well as a key source of fresh water. Deforestation has already damaged its ability to perform these crucial roles, and scientists in Brazilian estimate that increasingly warm and dry conditions could convert much of the forest to dry savanna, with potentially catastrophic effects. What should (or must) the international community do to prevent a misguided Brazilian president (or political leaders in other countries) from taking actions that could harm all of us? How far would the international community be willing to go in order to prevent, halt, or reverse actions that might cause immense and irreparable harm to the environment on which all humans depend.

By 2030 poor countries will need to spend $140bn-300bn each year on adaptive measures, such as coastal defenses, if they want to avoid the harm caused by climate change. That estimate, from the UN Environment Program, assumes that global temperatures will be only 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, which seems unlikely. Adding to the costs, research suggests that these countries face higher interest rates than similar countries less exposed to climate risks. This raises the prospect of a vicious cycle, in which the most vulnerable countries pay more to borrow, making adaptation harder and them even more exposed.

When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election last year, having run on a platform of deforestation, David Wallace-Wells, writing in New York Magazine, asked, “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” Bolsonaro didn’t pour lighter fluid to ignite the flames now ravaging the Amazon, but with his policies and rhetoric, he might as well have. The destruction he inspired—and allowed to rage with his days of stubborn unwillingness to douse the flames—has placed the planet at a hinge moment in its ecological history. “It is commonplace to describe the Amazon as the ‘world’s lungs’,” Franklin Foer writes. “Embedded in the metaphor is the sense that inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change. If the smoke clouds drifted only so far as the skies of São Paulo, other nations might be able to shrug off the problem as belonging to someone else. But one person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.”

Thanks in part to the carbon-hungry soils and peatlands they contain, boreal forests punch well above their weight as carbon sinks, covering 10 percent of the world’s land, but storing one-third of the land’s carbon. That stored carbon is under threat. Wildfires are becoming so frequent and intense that they are already turning some boreal forest areas from carbon sinks into net emitters.

By 2030 poor countries will need to spend $140bn-300bn each year on adaptive measures, such as coastal defenses, if they want to avoid the harm caused by climate change. That estimate, from the UN Environment Program, assumes that global temperatures will be only 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, which seems unlikely. Adding to the costs, research suggests that these countries face higher interest rates than similar countries less exposed to climate risks. This raises the prospect of a vicious cycle, in which the most vulnerable countries pay more to borrow, making adaptation harder and them even more exposed.

When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election last year, having run on a platform of deforestation, David Wallace-Wells, writing in New York Magazine, asked, “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” Bolsonaro didn’t pour lighter fluid to ignite the flames now ravaging the Amazon, but with his policies and rhetoric, he might as well have. The destruction he inspired—and allowed to rage with his days of stubborn unwillingness to douse the flames—has placed the planet at a hinge moment in its ecological history. “It is commonplace to describe the Amazon as the ‘world’s lungs’,” Franklin Foer writes. “Embedded in the metaphor is the sense that inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change. If the smoke clouds drifted only so far as the skies of São Paulo, other nations might be able to shrug off the problem as belonging to someone else. But one person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.”

Thanks in part to the carbon-hungry soils and peatlands they contain, boreal forests punch well above their weight as carbon sinks, covering 10 percent of the world’s land, but storing one-third of the land’s carbon. That stored carbon is under threat. Wildfires are becoming so frequent and intense that they are already turning some boreal forest areas from carbon sinks into net emitters.

“Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely. Retreating from coastlines and riversides might have once been considered unthinkable. But across the world, it’s already happening — in Australia, Colombia, Vietnam, and here in the United States. And Indonesia just found itself a new capital. The country’s president, Joko Widodo, announced on Monday that the new seat of government will be on the island of Borneo, hundreds of miles to the northeast of the current capital, Jakarta. The Java Sea threatens to swallow 95 percent of the city over the next 30 years.